Please Shut Up About BTW.

If you're not a member of a family, you probably don't really know Jack about it.

You could find out a decent amount about my family from my Facebook page, if you're that bored/stalkerish/aspire to become a misanthropic old bastard like yours truly. Where we're from. Who's related to who. What some of us do/are interested in/will eventually be arrested for.

You won't find out the old feuds, the secrets we're ashamed of, the ones drummed out or adopted in or why any of that happened. Because we don't share that shit with outsiders. We don't spread the private family business everywhere.

This doesn't mean my family is better than yours - necessarily. Maybe mine is. Maybe you've got white supremacists and rapists and child molesters and people who send their gay children to deprogrammers in yours. I think that shit is bad, and therefore will consider mine better than yours.

Maybe you think so too, and through time and the magic of non-biological family, become part of mine.

Or maybe you don't. Fine. But don't start spouting crap about "Irish upstate NY families" that has no resemblance to our reality and expect us to stay quiet. And don't then be a chickenshit who says, "who says we're even talking about YOU, you Irish upstate NY families always think we're talking about you and we could be talking about all Irish families blah blah bullshit".

What I find weird, all metaphor aside, is the amount of time people spend talking about traditions that they say aren't for them. Asatru, Thelema, Buddhism, Hinduism, Blue Star, Black Forest, Reclaiming, and a host of other trads/faiths are not for me. Notice I don't spend much time talking about them or responding to their adherents' blogs?

If you can't shut up about BTW (which is a specific thing bearing very little resemblance to a lot of things/people calling themselves and what they do "Wicca"), at least ask yourself why you're spending so much time criticizing us instead of dancing to the drum whose rhythm moves your soul.